Posts: 26 to 36 of 36

It's sad to see how skeptical a lot of people are about this. What about waiting and see what they come up with, before you start to say it will never happen?

Best regards SLJ.If you like the post, then please give it a thumps up.Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.Happy gaming... :D

It costs millions to make an AAA game. SMS had a crowd funded campaign for PCars 1. That got, from memory, around 3-4 million Euros. THEN they signed with Namco/Bandai. I was there. Now hear me out.

What happened next was....Namco came in, features got moved to DLC< features got cut, features got scrapped without a reason, all the while the studio head was saying everything was normal. Oh and of that 3 million....how much did I get? $60. Of 11 million sales at $60.

Here's a rough breakdown of what it costs to make a AAA game in 2018, genre agnostic:

You have staff wagesYou have staff insurance and beneitsYou have development tool costsYou have licensing deals to pay forYou have office rent to pay forYou have penalty clauses in the contract with a publisherYou have software costsYou have other overheads, like catering, and paying for company vehicles

Liensing's a tricky one. Here's a verry simple version:

I make a gameI go to Company AI ask Company A if I can use them in my gameThey pay me X bucks. They then say if I can have Y feature but not Z in my game.I do the game, I release itCompany A takes a cut of the profits if it's in the deal.

And the best part? Hey, nobody ever gets to see the exat terms of the deal.

Also, Ethin's right. The racing community on PC as a whole is so small and insular that it will slaughter anyone using the RAD, I've been run off of forums for merely mentioning blindness in off topic forums. That's how....interesting it is on racing game forums. Yet I've sat and painted cars for various sims over the years and done art work for various games, and the community never said thanks aside from hitting a button a few times and downloading. Point is.... the PC racing community as a whole is closed off and insular. There was a blog, now closed, that pointed out how insular the PC racing (specifically sim) market was. You got companies pushing $2500 wheels and pedal sets. Do you really think they want the RAD to come along? Admitedly it's like Apple, people who like their wheels will buy the latest and greatest.

Also to whoever said racing games are doable with a gamepad...no, for a simple reason...

Gamepads have what...50-60 degrees of travel vs up to 900+ on a wheel? For that reason alone during my time at SMS we had to fudge the gamepad input to make it remotely playable....yet the stats I saw for pCars 1? 99.9% of people were using wheel/pedal sets. I've been told from a former SMS dev who worked on PC2 that it's the same for the sequel. It's not a shock really...wheels are a better fit for racing games. On that note: TS3 has force feedback, by the way.

On that note: FF is nowhere near realistic actually. Nor are most* high end racing sims. That you can buy on a PC. The profssional grade stuff the teams use is a whole other level and the teams keep a strict grip on that one..

All it takes is for a big Youtuber to try the RAD and say they don't like it, boom, product us buried and nobody will take it seriously ever again in the general racing sphere. Here's a question: Would you want to be part of a community that only ever wants one way of playing games?

Trik question, I know, but....the racing genre on PC at least does, it's wheel or get out. Hell, I've seen and heard people who are supposedly high ranking sim racers sceam at new guys for being slow or making mistakes like spinning the car. Point is: You go online, with the RAD, with a wheel or gamepad, you're going to get torn to shreds regardlesss, the RAD just puts a bigger target on your back for the racers to point to and tell you to go back to running offline vs the AI.

Also, Exclusiity. Let's say EA gets a hold of this: They'll want to make it exclusive to their games. Turn 10 gets it? It's ONLY in Forza, Polyphony gets it? Only in GT Sport, Studio 397 gets it? ONLY in rFator 2. Point is: A publisher will want it to be exclusive to use as a stick to smack players with. See Porsche being exclusive to EA for some 15 years for evidence. See for 15 long years how EA bought up the desirable stuff and put out mediocre games. Fun fact: EA wanted to lock SMS to an exclusive deal. SMS were smart enough to outfox EA and get away from that.scea

1. EA are a publisher. The development work on Madden for example is carried out by a studio called EA Tiburon and published by EA Sports. The person behind it, Karen Stevens, is EA Sports' accessibility lead. She works at publisher level.

2. "most of the publishers will add, as a clause to their contract, that no accessibility features be added" No publisher has any clause in their requirements that no accessibility feature can be added. Most of them have requirements that some degree of accessibility consideration is made. Most of those requirements are private, but two that are public knowledge are Ubisoft's requirements for every game to include subtitles for deaf gamers and for every one of their games to pass the Harding test for gamers with epilepsy. If the level of accessibility provision in publisher level requirements changes in future it will be to change in the direction of adding more accessibiltiy requirements, not removing the existing ones or banning accessibility.

3. "if a publisher does permit the addition of accessibility features, just how much is that going to cost?" not much, especially if considered early, and especially if someone else has already done the work, as in this case. There is some really prominent work being done in big studios at the moment, getting a good deal of press and recognition from gamers both disabled and otherwise, and that work was all pretty cheap and easy. Ask Karen what percentage of the cost of the total development of Madden was taken up by the blind accessibility work.

4. "Come on, I dare you to go onto any hardcore gamer forum with a reasonable amount of members and tell people about this. I'm telling you, you'll be verbally slaughtered by them, if not outright banned for it." Done. I only posted a couple of minutes ago, there have been four replies so far -

"Interesting. I remember many years ago there was an audio-only racing game that started to explore the possibility of allowing blind gamers to play.""I'm not even blind and that sounds like a cool option for games. I kinda want to try it out.""Amazing! This is really innovative!""Awesome!"

ianhamilton_, I'm tired of arguing with you about this. I'll let time tell the story.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." — Charles Babbage.

sightlesskombat gave a talk at the game accessibility conference on Monday, and included a section on how to make mainstream racing games blind accessible. There were racing game developers in the room taking lots of notes.

Even just the fact that they were in the room meant that they cared enough to pay money to learn about accessibility.

Hi.Hmmm so we appear to have a couple guys that know whats going on.Yeah I have seen this exclusivity with sports teams, ever tried to buy a copy of a tenis shirt then try to buy the real thing at full price?I have family in the clothing business and brands are guarded jalously and anyone that thinks they can steal them and copy cat them is nuked so hard they go crying to their mummas so yeah I get what jace and ian/ ethin are saying here.I was once in a music group for my local blind organisation, however most of the group were from the poorer side of town.I was welcomed and was fine but it was clear I was the outsider and they had been doing things for ages, I felt odd so I quit.So yeah its hard to enter the exclusive market.However, on the other hand, I doubt that we would want to enter the pro cuicuit anyway, certainly not the online curcuit unless we want that thing.I have games that could do online but i play them mostly for myself, and when I have time to do so.Friends sometimes play with me but thats not our scene.What about consoles?Would we get better luck there or phones.Failing that, as I said what about if we never went online.I can't afford the cash nore have the space to stick a wheel.In order to get space for an old radio as well as chucking out all my junk, and extras, and due to what I allready have I can not have a screen, or a desk unit, my laptop, portable drives, phone and charger, usb gaming keyboard and mouse, usb powerboard and standard serge protection board take up everything on this desk which is not taken out by cheap to expensive mics, headphone sets, digital recorders, controlers for the stereo which takes up more of it, and extra speaker units.Its a struggle to fit it all in as it is.As for realistic gaming I'd personally wait and see but for me the keyboard is still king, I don't want or need high stakes racing or even online mainstream racing there is no way we can compete and if they don't want change I say fuck em and leave them to it.The chances we will want to do more than generally play are miniscule at best and if we do, with our selves or in some less serious communities, We can leave the pros alone for now.Ofcause if someone finally cracks that nut, all well and good and maybe one day a few blind people may crack the circuit but for now especially for me being one of the last 1980s guys with my condition, thats not for me anyway.

Hey magurp244 kind of, is on the Monday but the main GDC tracks don't start until Wednesday, most of the non GDC fringe stuff is on Mon/Tue. I actually just logged in specifically to share two links, the arstechnica article is one. The other is also about Karen, but in context of GAconf talk rather than GDC talk